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Sunday, June 27, 2010

Stonewall Uprising (video Sunday)

It is a sad indication of the marginalization of homosexuality in the late 1960s that media coverage of the Stonewall riots was mostly after the fact. And even then it was cursory and often condescending....

As one rioter remembers: “All of a sudden the police faced something they had never seen before. Gay people were never supposed to be threats to police officers. They were supposed to be weak men, limp-wristed, not able to do anything. And here they were lifting things up and fighting them and attacking them and beating them.” It was the first stirring of what came to be known as gay pride.

“This was the Rosa Parks moment, the time that gay people stood up and said no,” Mr. Truscott recalls. “And once that happened, the whole house of cards that was the system of oppression of gay people started to crumble.”

2 comments:

Well not quite the first stirrings. I went to a talk a couple of weeks ago at the local Humanist group on the history of the movement; its roots go back before Stonewall. video of talk (a few audio problems in the early bit).

Stonewall, I think, was the first militancy. The pre-stonewall folks, the Mattachine society, etc, they were working at a different level. Very brave, of course, and very alone--but for that, so easy to victimize. Once stonewall occured, the fags hit back, and that changed everything.